Sunday, May 23, 2004

May 23rd, 2004

Hello, I'm Mark Heimonen, and this is my first blogger post. I'm a 26 year old Systems Analyst, living in Ann Arbor, MI. I'm getting married in less than a week (May 29th), which I am pretty excited about. For the next few weeks, I will probably be posting about my wedding and honeymoon experiences. My fiance, Andrea, will be travelling to San Francisco and Yosemite National Park for our honeymoon. We also plan on skydiving while in the Bay Area. Everyone we talk to about tells us we will have a great time in San Francisco.

If I were to describe myself, I would say that I'm about 50% geek, 30% jock, and 20% musician. I currently work primary with Microsoft technology (ASP.NET, Sql Server, c#, and VB.NET), although I plan on expanding my expertise in open source technologies over the upcoming years. My home computer is set up to Dual boot between Windows 2000 and Red Hat 9.0. I hope to get a second box set up at home, so I can have a permanent linux box up and running. I want to eventually learn more about Java, Oracle, Perl, PHP, MySql. I'd really like to get my c#/asp.net running on a linux box with Mono. In my spare time, I spend a lot of time reading up on Slashdot.

On the sports front, I am primarily a hockey fan. I'm a huge fan of the Toronto Maple Leafs, and was really hoping to see them make the finals this year. The Leafs have had a great strecth of seasons under Pat Quinn the past six years, but have been unable to make it past the conference finals. Tampa Bay and Calgary have been playing great during the playoffs, and I'm looking forward to catching a few games before my wedding, as I'm forbidden to watch hockey during the honeymoon:)

When I find some free time, I am also working on a music project. I've written 6 songs over the past year, using virtual synths and a sequencer on my computer. All I have right now is an old Roland keyboard, an acoustic guitar, and a Radio Shack Microphone, so I'd like to eventually upgrade that portion of my recording studio.

About

In our modern society, with all it's comfort and convinience, it is far too easy to fall into a pattern of complacency. To borrow a term that was recently brandished by the 9/11 commission, I'd like to label this condition "Societal groupThink".

"Groupthink is a term coined by psychologist Irving Janis in 1972 to describe one process by which a group can make bad or irrational decisions. In a groupthink situation, each member of the group attempts to conform his or her opinions to what they believe to be the consensus of the group. This results in a situation in which the group ultimately agrees on an action which each member might normally consider to be unwise.

Janis' original definition of the term was "a mode of thinking that people engage in when they are deeply involved in a cohesive in-group, when the members' strivings for unanimity override their motivation to realistically appraise alternative courses of action." The word groupthink itself was intended to be reminiscent of George Orwell's coinages (such as doublethink and duckspeak) from the fictional language Newspeak, which he portrayed in his ideological novel Nineteen Eighty-Four."

I'd like to challenge you to re-examine your fundemental understanding; to re-think that which you know; to not accept the status-quo.